Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

A Putin-Sponsored October Surprise?

The previous post looked at fears that Russian hackers might try to either steal the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump or at least try to seriously disrupt voting returns - Arizona is one state that they apparently have targeted. The perhaps more serious concern is that bogus or re-written documents could be released - particularly with the help of pro-Putin Wikileaks - that would seek to damage Hillary Clinton and Democrats. Russia has a track record of such activities in other countries, but never before in America. A column in the Washington Post looks at the unsettling possibility that malicious efforts could strike American - and how the increasingly irresponsible media which seems to care only about sensationalism, could play right into Russia and Putin's hands. Here are column highlights:

The Russians
have just given us an August glimpse of a potential October surprise.

We learned earlier this summer that cyber-hackers widely
believed to be tied to the Kremlin have broken into the email of the Democratic
National Committee and others. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night
thatRussian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems.
And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy,
they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at
strategic points in the campaign.

Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t
just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen
information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that
add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.

Foreign Policy’s Elias Grollreported
last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at
least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from
George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create
the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was
funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted
Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s
operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential
election?

Russian
“dezinformatsiya” campaigns such as this go back to the Cold War; the Soviet
portrayal of AIDS as a CIA plot was a classic case. But this type of cyberwar —
email hacking and, now, the altering and release of the stolen documents — is a
novel escalation. It’s tempting to wonder how differently the Cold War might
have gone had there been cyber-hackers back then.

But it’s clear
that Russia’s disinformation wars are as active as ever. On Sunday,Neil MacFarquhar wrote in the New York Timesabout Russian attempts to undermine a
Swedish military partnership with NATO. The campaign is spreading false
information that there’s a secret nuclear weapons stockpile in Sweden and
alleging that NATO soldiers could rape Swedish women with impunity. This
Russian use of “weaponized information” helped cause confusion in Ukraine in
2014, when conspiracy theories spread by the Russians about the downing of a
Malaysian Airlines jet helped Russians justify their invasion of Crimea.

So does this point to a Putin-sponsored October surprise?

Putin
has meddled in domestic politics in France, the Netherlands, Britain and
elsewhere, helping extreme political parties to destabilize those countries. He
appears to be doing much the same now in the United States, where, in addition
to the DNC and state voter system hacks, there have also been reports this
summer about Russia hiring Internet trolls to pose on Twitter and elsewhere in
social media as pro-Trump Americans.

The
hyper-competitive American media environment is vulnerable to the sort of
technique the Russian hackers used in the Soros case — stealing documents,
altering them, then releasing them as the original. If Putin’s hackers were to
release such a doctored document smearing Clinton in, say, late October, it’s
likely that competition would lead outlets to report on the hacked documents
before they had a chance to see whether and how they were altered.

We don’t know what, if anything, Putin’s hackers have planned
for this fall. But the doctored Soros documents could be a clue.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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